Manage your subscription

Fighting fat with fake memories

FALSE memories of unpleasant experiences with unhealthy foods could be used to treat obesity.

Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, has already shown that elaborate false memories – for instance, of being lost in a shopping mall as a child – can be implanted in people’s minds (New Scientist, 6 September 2004, p 42). Subjects even go on to embellish these fictitious events with their own details.

In her latest work, her team convinced volunteers that they had been sick after eating strawberry ice cream as a child. Loftus and her colleagues gave 228 undergraduate students questionnaires about food. …